Though storage system enclosures may become more and more powerful, users are demanding a higher level of “user friendliness”. For instance, components of storage system enclosures may be mounted with a carrier to make transporting them easier. Aesthetically pleasing color schemes have had a significant impact upon these systems. This coloring has positively impacted the sales of these systems but has produced some negative results as well. In particular when identically colored components (e.g., hard disk drive, and the like) are located within a drive cage such as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage shelf, and the like, verifying that an individual drive is properly seated in the drive cage may be problematic. Ensuring that individual components of such storage system enclosures stay correctly seated, in order to maintain their productivity, may become even more troublesome as consumers and users continue to decrease the physical space they are willing to give to the storage system enclosure and increase the number of components. It may be useful to enable a simpler way of identifying improperly seated drives.
The solutions that have been formulated so far use additional components or circuits to detect the seating position of the drive. For instance, in a RAID storage shelf the controller assembly (e.g., filer head) may be responsible for monitoring the seating of individual drives through the ability to communicate with them. This may require additional processors be added to the control assembly specifically designed for detecting drive seating positions using additional interface points. Further, the circuits may require additional circuit boards and connections be added to the control assembly to accomplish the task. These solutions add cost and complexity to storage systems and create additional problems such as system failure and false alarms. Further, these solutions may not identify to the user a particular individual drive is not properly seated, thereby merely providing an indication that user communication with the storage system is not available. Thus, the user may be asked to spend considerable time and effort in order to identify the incorrectly seated individual drive.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have an apparatus, which provides a visual indication of engagement of a drive received within a drive cage so as to enable a user to identify an incorrectly seated drive, so that they may quickly and easily remedy the situation.